It was exciting when Hare Construction reached out to me about a big crane coming to one of their Pebble Beach job sites to hoist steel beams up and if I could get drone video of it. I have experience flying around cranes, and know it can result in some pretty cool drone video shots! Hare Construction is also one of my new repeat construction clients, as earlier this year I photographed one of their construction projects on Laurel Ave in Pacific Grove.
This was my most dynamic drone flight yet, following a crane as it hoisted AC units on top of apartment buildings. Most of my drone flights have been of still subjects, like luxury homes or rural land or bridges. Having a moving, not exactly predictable, subject was a welcome challenge. This is also my most advanced editing of a drone video. Watching it you may think I had two or three drones in the air at once as I cut between seemingly different views of an AC unit being raised to the roof. Actually, since the action of lifting an AC unit on to the roof is very uniform in crane and person movement, the cuts are of different units going up, but it looks like it is all from a single piece of action shot from multiple angles. I did not realize this was happening while flying, so it was a cool discovery in the editing process that I could make it seem like a “multi-cam,” or multi-drone as it were, shoot.
